Pages

Monday, 19 October 2015

On Friday I posted an incredibly moving account from a student's feedback on my lecture of how they experienced poverty and how my lecture resonated with them. Well thanks to the wonders of modern technology, here's the lecture itself. I think it's the point from 40 minutes onwards when I end up shouting at how shameful our track record on poverty is that particularly resonates with students:

I don't think I do that much in the lecture - all I do is explain the income definition of poverty and then draw on some of the statistics. I end up making the point that the reality of poverty is humiliation, shame and hardship because that's what the evidence shows. I get emotive about it because it would require rather minimal levels of targeted investment in our economy to tackle the problem. Also, a BIG thank you should go to my former colleague Kirsten Besemer who did a poverty lecture for me at Heriot-Watt and was so good I borrowed her first slide and a lot of the structure of this lecture from her. Thank YOU Kirsten.We can raise every household's income to two-thirds median. We choose not to.(P.S. Frank Field's lawyers - I'm only joking...)

Friday, 16 October 2015

"I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed your
lecture today; it was amazing to see someone passionate about this topic.

In the last year and a bit, no one has put so much passion
into a lecture/seminar/lab about poverty like you have today.

At the age of 4, my parents divorced and I became homeless.
My mum struggled to pull money together for us, and for a while it was rough.
We finally started to get into a more comfortable situation, but I'll never
forget the way she worked for us, the amount of hardship she had to go through,
the embarrassment she felt every day. I'll never forget how the care and love
she gave us and how she wished she could give us more in life but couldn't
because of our situation. My mum is my rock and she has put in so much love and
care into my upbringing (which is hard to do with three children all under 4
who are homeless).

Things started to get better for us, but it fell apart a few
years ago. We're currently classed as homeless again, and we are in temporary
accommodation. My mum struggles to pay electricity bills and gas for heat.

Your lecture really hit a close place in my heart today
because, after many lectures around this topic, you're the first to hit the
nail on the head. Other lecturers just give facts and figures, or cast blame to
parents. They make it sound like people in poverty are all walking around in
ratty clothes, who are neglected and unloved, who go through so much pain in
their lives and will never fight out of it. But today you showed that that's
not the case.

My mum struggles with things most consider a luxury; people
take granted they have heat and electricity. But many nights in my childhood we
didn't have either - we'd go to bed curled up next to her for warmth and security
when we didn't know what was going to happen to us.

My mum is an amazing human being, and you were a 100% right
when you said that most lone parents dote on their children. My mum would give
up her dinner to feed us, most nights we'd have boiled rice and gravy for
dinner because it's all she could afford.

I just wanted to thank you for being so passionate about it,
and for finally being the first to see it for what it is. For not clouding over
details and making it sounds like either a worse case than it is or sweeping it
under the rug. Whenever we've spoken about it before we mention how it's a taboo
thing and we don't go into much detail. But today I had to hold back a clap
because for once someone, someone outside our family, knows what we're going
through. They understand what we've faced and how despite it we still had an
amazing childhood. My mum struggled but she never let us see it. She always
made a game out of it or would make it fun for us. We never knew we were
struggling, and we never went unloved. She often would say "I wish I could
give you more" and when we were older "I'm sorry I couldn't give you
nearly as much as I wanted". But the way I see it she gave us more. She
gave us unconditional love and she has helped us become the people we are
today. We know the value of money now and we are a strong family unit. Yes,
we're back in the same situation again, but we've done it before and came out
strong, we can do it again.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know how much I valued your
lecture today and how grateful I am you understand the situations of families
out there, and don't sugar coat it or sweep it aside. You nearly had me in
tears and screaming "FINALLY someone gets it!"

Thank you so so much for today's lecture, it was interesting
to see someone else understanding poverty the way those who go through it do. I
really enjoyed hearing you speak today."

When Gideon Osborne became Chancellor of the Exchequer back
in 2010 I thought the coalition were being stupid. Vince Cable had shone
through in the general election campaign as being a sensible thinker on fiscal
policy – don’t cut for ideological reasons, and invest to maintain growth. As
far as I was concerned, Gideon was a posh, out-of-touch idiot who knew nothing
about economics. The “Pasty
Tax” seemed to be typical.

But since May I’ve come to realise Gideon is an incredibly
intelligent politician. I shall use two examples: austerity and the fiscal charter (with the
resulting political fun on Monday/Tuesday) and the austerity discourse; and the
devolution of taxation powers to Scotland.

Austerity

Now, Gideon is an austerity chancellor. He has cut public
expenditure enormously, although I was interested to note a fortnight ago that
Dennis Healey’s cuts in 1976 were greater. As I ruminated with Alex Marsh on teh Twitterz,
we are seeing the results of this in the fraying civility of our urban
landscapes – the vandalism left unrepaired, waste not collected or swept. And
as Julian Le Grand showed
in the 1980s, as this is a Tory government elected by people who use
schools and hospitals, the cuts are mainly on services Labour voters (or
non-voters) use: the benefits system and the nice fluffy extra stuff like urban regeneration and community development that local authorities used to be able
to afford.

But he has, quite obviously, not cut the deficit. As many economic
commentators and people on the left highlight, he spectacularly missed his own
spending targets and has borrowed a quite staggering amount and continues to do
so. This borrowing is paying for tax cuts for the rich – cutting the top rate
of tax and inheritance tax. But as this excellent
blog post highlights, these are just the sort of tax cuts floating voters
like as they aspire to be higher-rate taxpayers and think they’ll die with a
house worth a £1 million because they “work hard and do the right thing” (to
quoth Gideon).

So, I want to suggest that “tackling the deficit” and “austerity”
have become entirely symbolic. To throw myself into French post-structuralism,
they are now empty signifiers. We all laughed at the “long term economic plan”
nervous tick the Tories had during the election campaign, but over the many
weeks it stuck like an earworm. If you listen
to how David Cameron responded to Jeremy Corbyn’s questions from the
British public at Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesday, it’s a classic
example. The attacks on tax credits were very powerful, but the response was “we
have a long term economic plan to tackle the deficit and get Britain working”.
It’s a sentence that, literally, has no meaning in reality. But it cannot be
argued against.

Using all the powers of rational argument we have, we can
fill-in that: the deficit has not been cut; that promising to always run a
budget surplus will suck money out of the economy stymieing private enterprise;
that tax credits cuts are hitting hard-working families the most. But no one
will listen, because all they hear and know about is that the government has “a
long term economic plan to tackle the deficit and get Britain working”.
Unfortunately we have to play that game now. Whether Labour supports or doesn't support the Fiscal Charter doesn't matter. Gideon doesn't support the Fiscal Charter, as people have kept pointing out, he pilloried Labour's suggestion to do the same in 2010. But the Fiscal Charter is a "long term economic plan to tackle the deficit and get Britain working". It's symbolic policy can be used over-and-over again.

However, John Swinney has also announced he’s
not going to use the new tax-varying powers that the Scottish Parliament
has from this year thanks to the Scotland Act 2012. I want to hark right back
though, to the Land and Buildings Transaction Tax. Now, under the 2012 Scotland
Act the Scottish Parliament had Stamp Duty devolved to it. The Scottish
Government pointed out that the flat rate on transactions over £250,000 was
stupid and regressive. They worked out a revenue-neutral, banded scheme
instead. The Scottish Conservative in the Parliament realised that this would
hammer home owners in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow who fell into the
properties over £125,000 band who would suddenly have to pay.

Now, I’d be interested to know how much exchange went on
between the Scottish Conservative and Gideon at the Treasury on this.
Basically, five months after the LBTT was announced, Gideon announced he was
reforming Stamp Duty to make it more progressive and banded, but that it would
kick in at a higher level and overall it would reduce the amount of money
raised by the tax. John Swinney was then forced to quickly change the LBTT
bands to match the English ones, leaving a £50 million hole in the Scottish
Government’s finances.

Now, why do I think this is an example of Gideon’s political
acumen? Well, basically, it looks like with this, and the Non-Domestic Rates
policies, Gideon is forcing the Scottish Government to match the UK’s taxation
policies. Much as it might proclaim a distaste for austerity and a desire to
increase public expenditure, ultimately the Scottish Government seems to end up
being boxed into a corner. It will be interesting to see if Gideon reduces the
basic rate of Income Tax to 19% and whether the Scottish Government would then
follow.

There’s also a lot of political acumen from the Scottish
Government here. At the moment they have the get-out-of-jail free card that a
lot of these tax powers are unusable because the increased revenue is offset by
decreased block grant. But, if the Scottish Government did ever start using
them to lead to fiscal divergence from England, and it did result in economic
success and increased revenues and better public services, then they would walk
into the anti-independence argument of “well, it’s working ok for you now, why
do you need any more powers?”

So, I utterly loathe Gideon. But over the past couple of
weeks I’ve begun to realise what a political genius he is. I should also add,
the Non-Domestic Rates thing is particularly clever as everyone is clueless as it’s such as esoteric tax. It sounds
brilliant, but it is horrendous for local authorities and will massively
increase (listening to the leader of Nottingham Council utterly fail to explain
this fairly simple fact on BBC
PM). I really hope Gideon isn’t
the next Conservative leader, because then we have definitely got a Tory
government until 2025. That is, unless the long memories of those middling voters who have been hammered by the cuts to tax credits do come to haunt him.

Thursday, 8 October 2015

The Archers in fact and
fiction: Academic analyses of life in rural Borsetshire

Cara Courage, University of
Brighton, Nicola Headlam, University of Liverpool and Peter Matthews University
of Stirling invite the submission of abstracts to a seminar to take place on
17th February 2016 at University of Liverpool in London, Finsbury Square.

The seminar intends to take an
academic perspective on life in Ambridge and Borsetshire, with papers from
across academic disciplines. Papers might include:

A historical analysis of
rural Britain as heard through Archers’ storylines

A cultural analysis of
Archers’ fandom

A sociological analysis
of class dynamics in rural Britain through the lives of Archers’

characters

A hydrology of the Am
valley following the recent flooding events

Elderly care provision
in the rural setting

Participatory and
strategic planning in rural areas

Rural and village
economics, from the village store to agribusiness

The statistical
probability of no Ambridge residents listening to radio 4 at 2:00pm or
7:00pm

This list is not meant to be
exclusive or exhaustive, but is meant to inspire you to think how your academic
research can illuminate and explain life for the Archers and Ambridge. The day
is intended to give academic fans of The Archers a platform to exercise their
love of the programme and their subject area.

About Me

I'm a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling.
I blog about urban policy, cycling and other ephemera in a semi-professional manner. All posts represent personal opinions.